/ @ / Ghosts of the Antipode / @ /



.	.	/ < / << / Meanwhile in the North Maria Delithita, the voice said, and she turned. She was in her garden, cutting back the vines that threatened to wrap around her oak tree, the vines that Xenogears had insisted on planting. "Tomatoes are an efficient use of resources: they generate a lot of oxygen, are highly nutritious and useful as foodstuffs, and take few resources besides water which we have an abundance of here anyway." Sure, but they had the irritating tendency of seeking out her oak tree and climbing it like little parasites. She blinked, and the garden vanished. Dreams, she thought disgustedly, as she found herself out on the rim of a crater on the surface. She had her suit on, though it hardly mattered since she wasn't really there anyway. The sun flashed and her shadow on the feldsparic surface darkened. "What?" she snapped, turning around. She looked into the crater, seeing a ring of massive metal constructions stretching off into the distance, clear to the opposite side of the crater in the far distance, just before the horizon. The rim was edged with gold and sparkled in the sunlight. In the center of the crater, on the peak, a cone of metal girders sat. She stared at it, not comprehending. "You know what you must do," a voice said, and she turned again, startled. Maria sat in her chair regarding her. Debris and parts littered the floor and the table in front of her. It was their old cavern, before they abandoned it for the Colony several years previously. Maria flipped a card over. "Light," she said, revealing the two of Darkness. Del looked at her own hand and saw she had nothing to meet the challenge. "What am I doing here?" Shift. She was in the crater now. The girders and other support elements towered over her, hundreds of meters tall. Maria's voice. "You know what you need to do." She looked around, seeing only a maze of metal, black sky, and brown rock. Half a kilometer below, the rings of structures flashed with energy, and the cone lit up with brilliant gold light rivaling the Sun. "No I don't!" she cried, as the world flashed searing white-- With a gasp, Del sat bolt upright in bed, sweat pouring down her face, the sheets sticking to her bare skin. She looked around, seeing nothing unusual. She looked at her dresser, where only the rose in its transparent case was visible. She stood, went to the mirror, and as she looked in it she caught a flash of light. Spinning on one foot, she came to a crouch, but there was nothing there except a small, black rock. She frowned. That had not been there before. She turned the rock over and over in her hands, feeling a faint impression near the top (top? It's a rock, she thought) and studied it closely. It was a small, raised ring with a dot in the center. She held the rock between thumb and forefinger, raised it to the light, somehow knowing the proper positioning, and suddenly she understood. "I know what I have to do," she said softly. ----- "Missing?" Icey snapped. "Here we go again! Ops to Del, respond now!" Ko'ah shook his head. "I told you, she's gone. I called her awhile ago when I found her Minotaur missing, and there is no response. I raised the satellite to scan for her transponder, but she has disabled it. She could be a hundred kilometers away by now." "Set the satellite to do a high-intensity scan, a circle two hundred kilometers radius." "Icey," Ko'ah said in a tone suggesting he thought Icey needed to take a long vacation and possibly visit a mental health expert on the way, "You know as well as I do the Cybrids will see the thing and blow it out of the sky. And we don't have the spare fully operational yet." "Then Xeno's gonna have to work double time!" Icey snapped. Ko'ah sighed. "Whatever... can I at least center the scan on something other than the colony so the glitches won't figure out where we are?" "Yeah, yeah, center it on Petrarch Crater. It's about the only thing worthy of note around here anyway." The crater, a hundred kilometers to the southwest, was one of the few major, flat-bottomed craters in the Antipode region, though there were hundreds of smaller bowl-shaped ones less than twenty kilometers in diameter. "Right. Initiating scan. Five minutes to transmission, if the Cybrids don't blast it before we receive." Icey scowled, and paced back and forth, blowing off steam while he waited impatiently for the hermiosynchronous satellite to report its findings. He glanced at a monitor over his head, embedded into the sloping ceiling. Xenogears was working frantically trying to get another scan satellite operational. Fantasma only had one eye in the sky, and the current satellite was aging. The constant solar flux was burning through its casings and it already had lost half its instrument package to micrometeoroids. Its fuel was almost exhausted as well. A true hermiosynchonous orbit was impossible: Mercury rotated far too slowly. Therefore, the satellite had to fake it: it used a combination of solar sailing and high-energy orbit-shifting burns to maintain its position roughly a thousand kilometers over the Antipode. Icey was amazed the Cybrids had not already detected the burns and blown it out of space. "Reporting," Ko'ah said, reading his console's results. "Hmm... this is interesting." "What?" Icey snapped. "Did you find her?" "No, not yet, hold on. You need to see this." Icey growled something under his breath and went over to the console. "What is it?" "Notice. The Cybrid patrol density is about ten percent of normal through the entire Antipode. But notice, also, Mofolo Crater." "That's a couple hundred kilometers to the south." "Yeah. but the Cybrids are clustering there. It's right at the edge of this scan area but you can see there are thousands of vehicles roaming around that area." "Yeah, okay. But where's Del?" "I can't tell. I think this little spike," and he gestured to a tiny dot on the map-- "I think this is her. The small radar signature would be from Maria's crushed-rock paint. But if that's her, she's going about two hundred kilometers an hour." "Yeah, she put one of Xeno's turbine boosters in her Mino recently." "Anyway, she seems to be heading just about due north at top speed. And at the speed she's going and the distance she's already got, we'll never catch her." ----- The Minotaur leapt over a small crater, sailing off the rim like a gecko or a bird, nothing like the giant bull that gave the vehicle's class its name. Del grunted as it struck ground on the opposite side of the crater, the engines whining as the legs pumped with an uneven stroke to recover their stride. Halfway now, and another twenty hours would take her to her destination. The horizon dipped downward and she looked off the edge of a massive cliff, over a kilometer tall, that stretched northwest-southeast to the limits of her vision. She reluctantly slowed the vehicle and stopped at the brink of the precipice, and looked down. "Jump," she heard distinctly, and she swallowed. The Minotaur might survive the drop if she put full power to the shields and rotated them in the YZ axis, but she would not. Even in thirty-eight percent gravity, a thousand-meter drop would be like a four hundred meter drop on Earth. More, indeed, since there was no air worth speaking of to slow her fall to any terminal velocity. But there was no way around the scarp, at least not for several hundred kilometers. So she drove the vehicle off the edge and closed her eyes. A crackling sound made her open her eyes barely a second after the vehicle went over the edge. She stared uncomprehending at the interior of her cockpit: crackling gold lightning bolts were shooting sparks off the main support elements. Her eyes wide she looked to her console. The shield perimeter was expanding, strengthening. She tried to touch the controls to bring up a diagnostic, but a spitting bolt of electricity convinced her perhaps she shouldn't touch anything metal. The Minotaur stuck the base of the cliff and bounced several meters back into the air as if it were a rubber ball. Del felt only a mild shock as the shields collapsed and the vehicle fell back down, to come to rest perfectly on its feet. Del shook her head and touched the controls, which had returned to normal. It was only when she was well away from the scarp and crossing the valley to the next crater she checked the map. The craters on Mercury were named for artists of various disciplines. The valleys were named after astronomers of the twentieth century, especially those that contributed to the exploration of Mercury. The scarps, or rupes, were named after various exploratory vessels. The oldest names, given in the nineteen seventies after the Mariner 10 probe's initial visit to the planet, were of old Earth sailing vessels. Thus the scarp she had just jumped from carried the name Santa Maria Rupes. ----- "We've lost contact," Ko'ah reported. "It seems she jumped off a very large cliff." Icey's face paled as he read the screen that now displayed a rotating three-dimensional map of a cliff two thousand kilometers to the north. "Scan... scan for debris," he said softly. "Tight-beam, maximum intensity, and don't spare the photons." "Scanning..." There was a pause. "No debris noted. Should I check again?" Icey's eyebrow lifted. "No, don't bother. Somehow, she must have survived. But now we can't track her." Ko'ah cursed. "Satellite says the Cybrids at Mofolo are spreading out into their standard patrol patterns again, with a change. They've killed their beacons and they seem to be dispersing into single-unit forces. The satellite is now essentially useless." "So now we have no early-warning system. Great." ----- By the next day, the Ghosts had all learned of Del's disappearance. Xenogears summed it up: "There are two possibilities. Either she comes back intact or she does not. If the former, we would be wasting valuable resources needed to defend the colony, for minimal return. With the current Cybrid patrol pattern, a single vehicle has a greater chance of evasion than a vehicle with an escort. If she does not return, then she would be dead or unwilling to return. In either case, sending a rescue would not be of any benefit." Icey scowled at her. "Del's pulled your ass out of the fire enough times too you know." "Indeed. I would miss her if she failed to return. But there is little we can do other than wait." Razorback glanced at her. "Perhaps flying the Banshee over an extrapolation of her last known position and heading would be of benefit." Xenogears glanced at him. "That is a possibility." "Now wait just a damned minute," Icey began, but Razorback was already on his way out the door. Icey threw up his hands in disgust. "Since when have the Ghosts been reduced to anarchy?" he demanded. "Since Maria died," Altas said bluntly. Icey was unable to think of a response before he and Xenogears, too, left the briefing room. ----- Razorback was preparing the Banshee for takeoff as Xenogears went to the other side of the Banshee bay and activated the launch permission sequence. It wouldn't do for the missile turrets hidden in the rocks outside the Banshee bay to blow the flier out of the sky as soon as it took off. Razor was about to seal his helmet when Xenogears went to him and gave him a kiss before sealing it for him. "Be sure you come back," she said. "Or I'll have to come looking for you." "Right, and I'd be in trouble when you found me?" "Exactly." With a small smile that belied the worry in her eyes, she turned away. "Ready for launch," she said. He climbed into the vehicle and activated the main engines, bringing it to a hover a meter above the rock. "All systems go, ready to leave the bay." "Doors opening," Xeno said, then turned around to watch the massive slabs of rockslide out of the way to reveal the bay airlock. It was inefficient having an airlock for a hangar, she had thought, but Maria had insisted for some strange reason. The Banshee entered the airlock and the doors closed behind it, hiding the brown-painted vehicle from sight. The rumble of the outer doors opening reverberated through the rock. Razor looked out, glad he was not one of those who had a fear of heights. The sparsely cratered plains below (far below) shined in the near-noon sunlight, reflecting brightness all the way to the horizon. Straight down, the jumbled base of the scarp was a darker band eight hundred meters below. The entrance to the colony was just visible as a dark square among a pile of debris. Putting power to the engines, he arced around and faced the north. The land was ugly on the north side of the Antipode. Ko'ah had once described it as taking a bowl of Jell-O, shooting holes in it with a bunch of spitballs, freezing it into a brittle block and dropping it, then stepping on the shattered remains. It was not too far from the truth. Craters ripped apart by tectonic forces sat among rifts, valleys, tilted blocks of crust, and lava flows. It was not the easiest terrain to cross on the ground, and even airborne, Razor would have to fly close enough to the surface to make piloting rather interesting. The glint of sun on metal alerted him to a Cybrid Adjudicator a kilometer away. He dropped the Banshee to a bare five meters from the rock and did his best to swerve around projections and crater rims. His instinct was to attack, but obeying that instinct would take time, risk his destruction from the missiles he could see mounted on the vehicle, and possibly threaten the colony by diverting Cybrid patrols toward the area. He gritted his teeth and flew on. ----- Ten hours later, he had passed the Santa Maria Rupes, with considerably less difficulty than Del had had, obviously, and turned his sensors to thirty-degree sweeps. Since he was out of the Cybrid's main area of activity, a band wrapping unevenly around the planet from sixty south to sixty north, he would not instantly invite attack from SAM missiles or other ground-based threats by using his craft's sensors or communications. He flipped the switches for the low-band radio, and turned up the dial to feed more power to the transmitter. "Razorback calling Del, respond if you can hear me," he said, then repeated it a few times for good measure. Nothing. He sighed, slowed down to two hundred kilometers per hour, and began sweeping the ground with sensors. ----- Del worked feverishly. Time was of the essence, though she did not know why. She swung from the massive girders like a monkey, dropping down and landing with a grunt several meters away. The rock in her pocket seemed to weigh ten kilograms, and she was intensely aware of its presence. She turned a short length of metal resting on the ground, so that the ends made contact with several other points of the immense structure. She drew her hand back instantly, and her suit whistled as it detected the magnetic field of a massive current flow through the metal. She grabbed an overhanging beam that seemed to be placed there for the purpose, and lifted herself up to it. Immediately it began to move, lifting her even higher, several hundred meters higher. The cone of metal pieces beside her was humming, not with sound as she would have been unable to detect in the vacuum anyway, but with energy. She looked down. The rings and spokes of the structure in the crater bowl, kilometers in diameter, were flashing here and there with gold light. She looked up again. Her task was nearly complete. She stepped off at just the right time, climbing onto a trio of small beams projecting into the cone's hollow core. She climbed, then, lifting herself effortlessly in the low gravity, climbing the remaining fifty meters to the base of the cone's solid tip. She pulled herself up and around the solid object, a mass of metal, ceramic, and stone a dozen meters tall. She reached the top at last, and stood on a small, one-by-one meter square with nothing around it, nothing above it, only a few small supports attaching it to the rest of the structure. She took the rock from her pocket and dropped it into a small hole in the very center of the square, and looked through the hole. The rock fell through the short tube to come out inside the cone, then continued to fall, striking nothing, until it vanished from sight just before it reached the stone base on top of the crater peak. An instant later, just as it would have struck the crater peak, white light exploded from the point where the rock had vanished, and hovered there, casting black, spidery shadows among the sections of the structure. Del knew it was time to go. She climbed down, quickly but carefully, not really wanting to fall into the hovering white fireball below. She reached the surface in about half a minute, then took off at a dead run for her Minotaur parked near the base of the structure's center. She boarded and hit the acceleration without even strapping in, and the Minotaur bounded away, leaping over the jagged rock of the crater's peak. It reached the base and headed eastward, its path chosen by the gaps in the concentric rings and spokes surrounding the peak. Five minutes later, it was out of the crater, and not a moment too soon. The rings erupted in an explosion of light, and the vehicle's shields flashed as a massive burst of radiation exploded outward. Fortunately, the raised rim of the crater already sheltered her, and her vehicle's armor prevented her from receiving a dangerous dose of radiation. The Minotaur was not so fortunate: the control systems immediately shorted out and the vehicle's displays started flashing static at her. With a curse, she wrenched the manual controls up from their rest position, shoved her hands into the control yokes, and pulled the Minotaur to the right, heading south as quickly as the damaged vehicle could manage. ----- Razorback maintained his vigil despite his growing fatigue, and that is the only thing that saved his life. "Holy--" He brought the Banshee into the fastest upside-down powered dive he'd ever attempted, just in time as a massive explosion on planet's limb lit up the entire visible face of the planet. Whatever the explosion was, the radiation from it would soon tear through the area and he had no interest in being exposed to it. As he landed his Banshee inside a tiny crater just big enough to fit it, he tried to imagine what had ignited the blast. Not even a thermonuclear device could have made an explosion like that, he told himself. Was some fool playing around with antimatter or zero-point energy? The radiation burst was visible above him as a faint tracing of light, not moving through the atmosphere Mercury didn't have, but actually lighting up the micrometeoroids in space above. He whistled. He waited for about half an hour for the radiation to dissipate enough for the Banshee to handle, then took himself up to a hundred kilometers. He stared at the terrain below, focused on where the explosion had occurred, and shook his head. There was no visible damage. No massive, smoking crater, no burned or melted rock. Nothing. "Razorback to Delithita, respond if you can hear me." A faint transmission-- "...Razor... Endeavour..." Endeavour? He shook his head. It had sounded like Del's voice... He looked at the map. Sure enough, there was an Endeavour Rupes only a hundred kilometers from where the explosion had occurred. Del's transmission apparently came from underneath the scarp's massive face. "Roger that, Del, I'm on my way," he responded, and breathed a sigh of relief. ----- "So, now the radiation levels of Derzhavin crater are high enough to choke a Cybrid, and your Mino is banged up. What did you go out for?" Icey demanded. "I had to," was Del's only response. "You had to," he echoed. "Why?" Del shook her head. "I don't know. It's something... something Maria told me to do... several years ago..." Several years, or was it only days ago? She could not quite remember, nor could she shake the faint recollection of the dream. "Since when did she ever go that far north for anything? That area's so worthless even the Cybrids don't want it." "I think that's why," Del said softly. "All Ghosts to Ops," Xenogears's voice rang over the comm system. Icey and Del entered immediately; the briefing room was adjacent to Ops anyway. "What is it, Xeno?" "New satellite is up and functioning. I ran a scan of Mofolo Crater." She gestured to the screen. "Oh... my... God..." The crater was about fifty kilometers in diameter. And there, nestled within the tall rim, was a city, bustling with activity, Hercs patrolling the outer rim. But it was a Cybrid city. "I set the thing to run a scan of the planet, and it seems we have more of these things. About twenty of them." "The Cybrids have been getting their butts kicked on the Caloris side, with all the new forces dropping," Icey said. He had heard about this from a recent Tarazedi Alliance intelligence report. "And, since they're also getting their butts kicked in the rest of the system, they've decided to take what they have of Mercury... and fortify their holdings..." Del shrugged, apparently unconcerned. "So apparently we have a job to do." / < / << /

Meanwhile in the North

Maria